Shadow

This interesting post got over 10 comments in a few hours. Besides 危机, I cannot think of any word with 机 that (a) means something like change or opportunity AND (b) is negative. 机会， 转机，契机…

Mair’s main point is that 机 is neutral, and any possitive association with the sense of "opportunity" is incidental and is colored by the other character/morpheme in the word. 

While I agree with Mair that

A wēijī in Chinese is every bit as fearsome as a crisis in English. A jīhuì in Chinese is just as welcome as an opportunity to most folks in America.

I would like to argue that in the case of 危机, 机 is colored by the negative connotation of 危. By itself, it feels to be something more desirable than neutral. Because 机 is a bound morpheme, it is difficult find cases where it is not colored by context. Nonetheless, the morpheme does appear in a few 4-character idioms in which 机 alone represents the sense of time, such as 机不可失 and 伺机而动. In both cases, 机 is clearly something desirable and would be best translated as "opportunity". 

CRISIS.

You will often see references to the alleged fact that the Chinese character for ‘crisis’ is made up of the word for ‘danger’ plus the word for ‘opportunity’ (or, as here, that the Japanese character is so composed). I have no idea how this claim became so popular, but Victor H. Mair at Pinyin.info has done a thorough debunking:

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages… The third, and fatal, misapprehension is the author’s definition of jī as "opportunity." While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean "crisis" and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of "danger," the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify "opportunity."… The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one’s skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis.

There very well may be cases where jī by itself is used in the sense of "opportunity" (there’s 机不可失 jī bù kě shī, "Don’t miss the opportunity" for example), but in these, too, the base meaning of "critical point" is colored by the context. A folk maxim is not likely to advise against letting peril slip out of one’s hands, so jī is interpreted in a positive sense.

Like John Emerson says, playing with etymologies is not verboten; Mair’s larger point seems to be that ascribing some kind of deeper meaning to an "eastern" interpretation of crisis on the basis of a playful etymology is a mistake. In English, we can toss around things like "When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", but to believe that the word was somehow constructed in that way is over-reaching somewhat.

Posted by: zhwj at January 19, 2005 11:12 PM